SHUT THE FUCK UP AND DIE!
by William Todd Rose
SCENE ONE
She had quickly learned to keep movement at a bare minimum; even the slightest jostle sent flares of agony racing through her hands and coaxed beads of sweat from the pores on her brow. As long as she sat perfectly still, however, the pain was nothing more than a dull throb that pulsed in time with her heart. She choked back the waves of nausea that flooded her mouth with bitter, stinging acids and kept her breathing as steady as could be expected. She was beginning to get cold, though: chills crept over her naked flesh and she felt the little muscle in her jaw quiver like a frightened animal. It was only a matter of time before her body was wracked with shivers; and with these involuntary movements would come fresh blasts of pain, a Hell that radiated from the palms of her hands and raced along her arms like fiery serpents. So she tried picturing a beach: the sun sparkled on the blue expanse of water, warmed the sand that stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see; overhead, a gull cried out and that salty aroma in the air was nothing more than the waves leaving traces of foam as they pulled back into the ocean. Nothing more than saltwater. Certainly not the lingering tang of blood or….
Why don’t they just kill me and get it over with?
She opened her eyes and looked, for what must have been the thousandth time, at the rusty spikes that had been hammered through her palms. The flesh puckered around the metal and the inner edges were crusty with congealed blood; her skin had become so pale and shriveled that it looked as though she’d been washing dishes for hours and this made the dark scabs seem as if they were floating just slightly above the wound. She knew better than to wiggle her fingers, but fought the urge to do so anyway. Part of her mind insisted that those couldn’t be her hands, that they were nothing more than some thrift store gag gift: her hands would never be nailed to a heavy, oak table; her hands wouldn’t look so small and old…. And they definitely wouldn’t just lay there with upturned palms as if praying to some cruel god in supplication.
This sort of thing simply didn’t happen to people like her. She was just Darlene Honnicker, ex-homecoming queen of Beaverly High and head cashier down at the Shop-N-Go. She lived a boring, predictable life that involved doing inventory on beer and smokes, watching TV in the evening, and occasionally splurging on the latest Barbara Kingsolver novel. No. It had to be some sort of a dream, some nightmare from which she’d bolt awake with phantom pain still tingling in her limbs. She wouldn’t even care that Chewie had slipped onto the forbidden bed at some point during the night or that the mutt was infesting her grandmother’s quilt with fleas. She would hug him so tightly that she’d feel the need to sneeze as his coarse fur tickled her nose and his breath would gust like a rancid wind as his tongue left a trail of warm slobbers down her cheek.
Yeah, that’s what you thought yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that, too….
Darlene glanced around the room even though the details had burned into her memor. The fake wood paneling looked as if it had been hung by a child and bits of yellowed rag stuffed gaps where the flimsy material should have lined up flush with the next section. These walls were covered with random rectangles and squares where the grain was lighter, as if pictures had hung there for years before being removed, and she’d come to the conclusion that the inset shelving had once been a window that had since been boarded over. The hardwood floor that felt so cold against her bare feet bowed slightly toward the center of the room and the entire space had that musty smell of time and age. If not for the butcher’s block table that her hands were nailed to and the chair she was perched on, the entire place could have been mistaken for an abandoned house that hadn’t known the warmth of a living soul for decades.
Nailed to, oh my God, my hands have been nailed to the table, sweet baby Jesus, they’ve been nailed, somebody please please help me, anybody, please….
Darlene’s heart fluttered with demon wings of panic and she wanted to scream, to run, to pry her tortured hands free, and fight tooth and nail until she was out in the fresh, cool air of winter again. She would thrust her fists into drifts of snow, let the cold freeze away the pain, and her voice would echo through the muffled silence of the woods like the wail of a banshee. Someone would come. They would hear and they would come with trucks and dogs and guns; they would wrap her in blankets as steaming cups of coffee were lifted to her lips, whispering that everything was fine now, that she would be okay, that it was over….
Through the cheap wood of the door behind her, she could hear the old woman whistling. It was some happy little ditty that tweeted and chirped like birds at dawn and sounded slightly familiar. It may have been one of the songs Darlene’s mother had used to hum before the cancer had claimed her. One of the snippets of tune that she’d clung to over the years, that she’d tried to excavate from the trenches of memory like a precious jewel. And here this old woman was, bastardizing it. If she managed to get free, she’d rip that cunt’s tongue right out of her mouth, would tear long strands of lip with her teeth if she had to. She’d make that bitch suffer and regret the day they’d ever zapped Darlene Honnicker with that taser.
Who the fuck are you kidding? You ain’t getting outta here, you’re never getting outta here. Just look at the damn table, girl….
She willed the frightened little girl in her mind to shut the hell up. Anything was possible, right? If she could just deal with the pain without passing out, maybe she’d be able to grab the spikes between her teeth and yank hard enough to….
Her faded, blue eyes betrayed her by flitting to the scarred tabletop. The wood was gouged with dozens of holes, each spaced approximately a hand’s width apart and surrounded by dark, inkblot stains.
That’s blood. Fuckin’ blood! You think they haven’t done this before? Look how many holes there are, damn it. Just look!
She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that her teeth ground against one another and tried to take long, slow breaths through her nose.
Please, God….
From behind her, the door creaked like a sound effect from a horror movie. Feet shuffled across the floor and the room was flooded with a scent that smelled as if a garden of lilacs were growing in a bed of baby powder.
The whistling was directly behind her now, making her eardrums seem to vibrate with the high notes.
No, no, not again, please, no….
The song came to an end and Darlene could felt the old woman’s presence looming in the darkness before her.
“Open your eyes, girly.”
The voice was thin and raspy but sounded as if it had spent a lifetime having its instructions followed without hesitation or question.
Darlene raised her eyelids and looked at the woman standing on the other side of the table. Her hair was as white as the snow covered ground and, as always, was pulled into a bun so tightly that it almost seemed as if the bitch were punishing her scalp for some unknown trespass. Her skin looked as thin and wrinkled as tissue paper and she wore a yellow sundress today which made her normally pale flesh look jaundiced and sickly. At the same time, it also threw her eyes into sharp contrast: behind the wire-frame spectacles, they looked as hard and dark as two chunks of coal.
“There’s a good girl. You wouldn’t want to make Mary mad, now would you? No, of course you wouldn’t.”
Darlene glanced at the paring knife the old whore clutched in her hand and her eyes immediately darted to her own arms. Once, her skin had been as smooth and creamy as any fashion model’s; but now the flesh was crisscrossed with wounds. Some of them were crusted with scabs, but others still looked like lipless mouths that had somehow appeared on her body. If she flexed her muscles, they would pucker and blow kisses to her, revealing dark crags of meat within.
“Please, Mary, just let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear I won’t. Just let me go home. I’ll… I’ll bring you a replacement! My sister! She looks just like me, I’ll lead her here and let you have her, just please, please, please let me go.”
The old woman frowned, pulling shadows into the creases of her wrinkles.
